This article analyzes the Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s (ASEAN) interactions with China over the South China Sea issue since the end of the Cold War. A neorealist understanding of ASEAN’s international relations is advanced. This approach highlights the degree of security maximizing interest convergence between key ASEAN actors and an extra-regional actor, the United States, to explain the varying outcomes in the empirical record. Our approach is contrasted to alternatives in the existing literature that either overemphasize or underemphasize ASEAN’s autonomy in regional politics.
In New Zealand, Edward Snowden's revelations about the extraordinary scope of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) surveillance capabilities and the facilitating role of the Five Eyes alliance converged with increasing public concerns about the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) Amendment and Related Legislation Bill in 2013. This generated an intense and sustained debate in the country about surveillance policy. It was a debate in which the Prime Minister John Key has featured prominently. While apparently unable to clearly refute Snowden's claims concerning mass surveillance in New Zealand, John Key's vigorous public interventions helped counter the short-term political and diplomatic fallout. However, the longterm impact of public concerns over the surveillance policies of the Key government may be much harder to predict in what is an intimate democracy, and the prospect of substantial political blowback cannot be ruled out. The Snowden revelations has coincided with growing public disquiet in New Zealand about the role of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), an agency responsible for foreign signals intelligence collection and counter-intelligence operations. This disquiet had notably increased in May 2013 after the John Key government announced it would introduce the GCSB Amendment and Related Legislation Bill (hereafter the GCSB Amendment Bill), a measure which proposed to significantly extend the powers of the GCSB to collect information on New Zealanders for the use of other government departments including the New Zealand
This article investigates the history of ASEAN's relationship to external intervention in regional affairs. It addresses a specific question: What was the basic cause of the success of ASEAN resistance to the Vietnamese challenge to ASEAN's sovereignty from 1978-1991? ASEAN's history is understood in terms of a realist theoretical logic, in terms of the relationship between an ASEAN state with the most compelling interests at stake in a given issue, which I call a 'vanguard state,' and selected external powers. Using the Third Indochina War (1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991) as a case study, this article contends that ASEAN's ability to resist violations to the sovereignty of Thailand from a Soviet-backed Vietnam is a consequence of high interest convergence between Thailand, and a designated external power, China.
The Obama leadership has seemingly gone further than previous administrations in recognizing that globalization has fundamentally reshaped the structure of world politics, and made the idea of US unilateralism deeply problematic. In the words of Susan Rice, while US leadership in the world "is necessary it's rarely sufficient". But the Obama team's fresh emphasis on diplomacy, its tilt towards multilateralism and its desire to lighten the US' global military footprint has not led to the abandonment of US exceptionalism. Rather, US exceptionalism has been reframed in terms of the resilience and power of the American democratic and economic example in an interconnected world. History, the Obama administration contends, is on the side of the American democratic political system. In contrast to authoritarian rival states, the US democratic model is not only more prosperous and stable, but is also able to more successfully adapt to the pressures and opportunities of globalization.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) pursuit for a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN) first began during the Cold War, at a time of intense superpower rivalry in Southeast Asia. ASEAN reaffirmed the importance of this principle in 2020, amid growing concerns of instability in the Asia-Pacific region as a result of increasing tensions between the United States (US) and China. Through an examination of the ZOPFAN principle, this paper seeks to develop a greater understanding of ASEAN's ability to respond to periods of geopolitical crisis and Great Power rivalry. It asks whether a ZOPFAN in Southeast Asia has ever been successfully realised, and what is the likelihood of one being achieved in the future. As analysis of recent security challenges will show, ZOPFAN falls short as both a framework for regional security and as an expression of regional autonomy. This raises serious questions about ASEAN's coherence in the post-Cold War era, and its ability to uphold regional order in light of renewed Great Power security competition.
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